Various mechanisms in flash memories result in single write errors as a dominant type of read errors, especially at good signal-to-noise ratios. Some of the write error mechanisms that severely affect soft-decision decoding success include: cells stuck at certain states that resist being programmed to other states or are mis-programmed; reading lower-page-only pages before writing multi-level-cell wordlines; compacting single-cell pages into a triple-level-cell page; and other read-side issues that have the same effect on soft information as the write errors. An example of read-side issues occurs in read retry methods where a voltage read window is not wide enough to capture errors and so saturated fixed point log-likelihood ratio values are generated.